Survivors of the Ritzkrieg

R
ailways brought the great hotels to London. The first purpose-built hotels –
the Great Northern at King’s Cross and the Great Western at Paddington,
which both opened in 1854 – served passengers using the new train termini.
The opening of the Savoy Hotel in 1889 inaugurated a sumptuous new phase of
London hospitality. Another cascade of grand hotel openings flowed around
the time of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee – the Cecil (1896), Claridge’s
(1897), the Russell (1898) and the Carlton (1899). The apogee was reached
with the Ritz in 1906. The Waldorf, which opened in 1908, brought the
luxuries of New York’s St Regis to London. The Regent Palace, off
Piccadilly, was the largest hotel in Europe when it opened in 1915: designed
in emulation of New York’s Knickerbocker, it provided ritzy amenities for
the economy class. In 1924, the Duke of Westminster sold Grosvenor House to
the soap millionaire Lord Leverhulme, who intended to convert it into an
arts centre. Leverhulme’s plans were abandoned after his death, the ducal
palace was demolished, and Grosvenor House Hotel opened on its site in 1929.
In that year, the Earl of Morley, who had recently inherited Dorchester
House further south on Park Lane, sold it to a syndicate led by the McAlpine
construction family, which opened the Dorchester Hotel in 1932.

The Savoy’s first general manager was a Swiss shepherd’s son, César Ritz, who
during the siege of Paris had made boudin from the blood of elephants killed
in the zoo. Ritz appointed as head of kitchen services a blacksmith’s son
called Georges-Auguste Escoffier, who wore high heels so that he could peer
into pans at the back of the ranges, and refused to learn English because he
feared that the language would spoil his cooking. Ritz and Escoffier were
dismissed from the Savoy in 1898 after massive embezzlements were
discovered. They were soon hired by the newly opened Carlton, where they are
later said to have employed a young entremettier named Nguyen Sinh Cung,
long before he took he took his nom de guerre of Ho Chi Minh. Ritz and
Escoffier’s next venture, the Ritz hotel, soon opened on its nonpareil site
overlooking Green Park.

In The West End Front: The wartime secrets of London’s grand hotels, Matthew
Sweet writes that Ritz and Escoffier together “created the ambience that
persuaded the plutocracy and the aristocracy to do something to which they
were unaccustomed – eat, drink, smoke and dance in public”. This is not
quite right for the period before 1940. The women of the old guard nobility
were not interwar habituées of the world that Bernard Berenson dubbed
“Ritzonia”. Until the outbreak of war in 1939, the Marchioness of Salisbury,
who lived next door to the Ritz, had never eaten in a London restaurant.
Lady Desborough had seldom dined anywhere but in private homes: only when
all the menservants had joined the fighting forces did she acquire her quiet
corner table in the Ritz’s gilt and mirrored restaurant. Similarly, although
upper-class men attended political banquets at the Hotel Cecil, until it was
demolished to make way for petroleum offices, or the Carlton, until it was
bombed in 1940, they were not heavy peacetime users of restaurants, unless
they were discreetly entertaining other men’s wives. West End hotel
restaurants were patronized because money talk, or business discussions,
were (and still are) forbidden in the clubs of St James’s. Hotel restaurants
were the domain of business millionaires: the Federation of British
Industries was hatched over luncheons at the Savoy; one of its young
officials recalled an industrialist detaining a waiter filling digestif
glasses with green chartreuse with the words, “leave the bottle, will you,
my man”. Aristocrats were luncheon rarities in the pre-war Savoy Grill
unless, like Lord Castlerosse, they were journalists in nearby Fleet Street:
Castlerosse was altogether exceptional, for he liked three chops, an entire
ham, and several lobsters for lunch.

Lord Castlerosse liked three chops, an entire ham, and several lobsters for
lunch For people with aspirations the grand hotels were a crucial
symbol of betterment. Evelyn Waugh recounted in Robbery Under Law that in
1939 he saw three films in consecutive weeks in crowded cinemas: “all dealt
with the single theme of a girl who goes to a fashionable hotel with
borrowed clothes and an assumed title and ends by marrying a real
millionaire”. As Sweet demonstrates with rich flourishes of anecdote, during
1940–45 London’s de luxe hotels achieved unprecedented cultural and
political importance as the temporary homes of Cabinet ministers, displaced
royalty, governments-in-exile, military leaders, foreign pressmen, and (in
Sweet’s grating catch-all phrase) “plutocrats and aristocrats”. He has a
good word to describe this aspect of the Home Front, Ritzkrieg. It is key to
the success of his racy, humane book that, although most surviving
historical evidence relates to the rich, he has delved deep to trace the
experiences of the underprivileged, and his sympathies are with the
disempowered. There is an excellent chapter on the internment of Italian
waiters, for example, and an unpleasant account of the deputy chief of MI6
bullying the Italian manager of the Savoy Grill into providing fresh Stilton
with taunts of his ability to have men detained.

In a rousing introduction Sweet writes that under Ritzkrieg conditions,

“con-artists and swindlers, invigorated by the opportunities brought by war,
hunted for victims among the potted palms. Illegal abortionists, profiting
from the wartime increase in unwanted pregnancies, conducted their business
behind locked hotel-room doors. Writers, poets, artists, musicians and
prostitutes haunted bars and lobbies. Below the pavement of Piccadilly, a
flourishing homosexual subculture worked its way through the Ritz’s stock of
gin and Angostura bitters. Cooks tested the limits of the rationing law and
their own ingenuity, confecting dishes from acorns and turnips and eels, and
cooking on electric radiators when bombs deprived them of gas . . . .
Spymasters made rooms above Park Lane, Piccadilly, Brook Street and the
Strand into thriving centres of espionage, using quiet suites for
debriefings and interrogations, picking at the plasterwork for hidden
microphones, and despatching agents of the secret state to loiter in the
coffee lounges and listen for treachery. The Dorchester, the Savoy, the Ritz
and Claridge’s: each was a kind of Casablanca.”

Sweet delivers what this passage promises.

The Dorchester grabs the spotlight in The West End Front. It was reckoned to
be bomb-proof because of its steel frame, and was occupied by a clientele
seeking refuge from nightly bombardment with “nothing in common but wealth,
or a cherished history of wealth”. Sweet misses a few good stories about the
Dorchester – Lord Castlerosse’s ex-wife took a fatal drug overdose there
after being berated in a corridor as a wartime slacker by the Duke of
Marlborough – but overall he provides a vivid evocation of an unofficial
power centre of wartime London. Among other nice details, readers learn that
Unity Mitford’s gynaecologist was called Overy; that in 1940 the Dorchester
band was asked to drop “Boomps-a-Daisy” from its playlist because officers
were carrying revolvers in their hip pockets; that François Latry, the
Savoy’s maître chef des cuisines, quipped during rationing, “où sont les
sorbets neiges d’antan?”; that an aged Venetian marchesa used black boot
polish when she could no longer afford eye shadow; and that Eva Sherson’s
husband “was enormous in Malayan rubber”.

Unity Mitford’s gynaecologist was called Overy Occasionally Sweet
yields to the temptation of good stories that strain credibility, or retells
scandalmongers’ pipe dreams – there is an allusion to the
politician Duncan Sandys which is not only unpleasant but untrue. A squalid
confidence trickster baronet is allotted too much space because Sweet has
charmed his way into seeing confidential family papers. Sweet finds evidence
of revolting anti-Semitism, but sometimes goes beyond the facts. The quotations
that he plucks from the diaries of Elizabeth Bowen’s diplomat lover Charles
Ritchie say more about Sweet’s assumptions than Ritchie’s. Other
diary entries referring to Miriam Rothschild show Ritchie’s entrenched philo-Semitism.

Sweet’s book comes alive when he meets survivors of the 1940s. The respectful
tenderness underlying his interviews gives them a memorable quality. There
are animated interviews with Max Levitas, last survivor of a brigade of East
End Communists who invaded the Savoy’s air raid shelter; Joyce Stone, who
spent her nights in the Dorchester, where her husband conducted the dance
band; an elderly, blind Italian whose family introduced tutti-frutti to
Staffordshire; and a renowned Savoy barman (some of whose stories seem
tall). Sweet’s interviewees include two resilient, camp old men boasting
about their wartime pick-ups in the underground bar at the Ritz, known as
the Pink Sink. One of them, while Sweet is interviewing him about the
thrills of black-out sex under police surveillance, starts flirting from the
open window with a young policeman passing by. “Where have you been all my
life?” the policeman sings out just as coquettishly. The West End Front is
full of such casual exchanges, rattling laughter and odd affinities.